Juan A. Barceló

Juan A. Barceló obtained a PhD in History and Archaeology in 1989 at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. After a 2 years Post-doctoral stage at the CNRS-Paris, collaborating with Jean Claude Gardin, he came back to the Department of Prehistory, Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona, where he has being teaching and doing research on statistical issues in archeology. He is the founder and director of the Laboratory for Quantitative Archaeology and Computer Applications, and co-founder of the Laboratory for the Computer Simulation of Social and Historical Dynamics. He has been named President of the Spanish Association of Computer Applications in Archaeology, and represents Spain at the International Association on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology International Society, and Commission IV Data Management and Mathematics of the Union International for Prehistoric and Protohistoric sciences.

Research interests

Juan A. Barceló is interested in all questions related with the theoretical and methological development of Archaeology and the Historical sciences, notably on the domain of so-called Digital Humanities. He has investigated the suitability of modern statistical tools for the Spatial Analysis of archaeological data, and explored alternative methods for data mining, seriation and classification (neural networks, probabilistic graphical models, etc.). Currently, he is engaged in new artificial intelligence approaches to the analysis of social dynamics of past societies (computer simulation) and also in many projects related with Computer Assisted Visualization and Virtual Reality applied to Digital Heritage. As an archaeologist, he has participated in excavations in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Syria, Nicaragua and Argentina.